I had the opportunity to attend the Sphinconn 2011 SEO conference in Jerusalem this week. Sphinconn was a one-day conference which was organized by a very nice guy named Barry Schwartz, who is the Executive Editor of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land.
All in all it was a good conference with good speakers from several countries. Obviously, most of the speakers were from Israel but there were also SEO experts from the UK, USA and Europe. I spotted a few Googlers in the crowd that sported some spiffy T-shirts. Human networking was very good: there were lots of timely breaks which gave you the opportunity to talk to some interesting and knowledgable people. The computer networking however sucked!!! The Internet did not work for most of the day. The Tweeters got bored and I noticed a few people who experienced withdrawal symptoms. If I was Barry’s shoes I would have kicked some asses for letting me down so badly.
Here are some of my impressions learned from the conference:
Google. Google, Google. Most of the speakers discussed how to get page ranking on Google. Very little information on other search engines was provided.
Matt Cutts, Matt Cutts, Matt Cutts. Since Google was so dominant, the most widely quoted and cited person at the conference was Google’s SEO king Matt Cutts. Long live the king!
Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. There were lots of talks on the value of Facebook as an SEO tool. Since I am not really on Facebook I did not pay too much attention. But clearly SEO mavens are focusing on Facebook as both a tool for advancing SEO on Google and Bing and also as an emerging ad platform which will steal some of Google’s thunder.
The ever elusive one-handed SEO expert. US President Harry Truman once said: Give me a one-handed economist. All my economists say, ‘on the one hand…on the other.‘ The same can be said about SEO people.
SEO is stuck in a time warp. Should you buy text links (or will Google penalize you)? Should you trade links? Should you blog? How to follow the competition’s links. When excessive linking is considered search engine spam. What is the best form of anchor text. These and other issues which were discussed by conference panelists are as old as SEO itself. And every question raised by conference delegates usually got 2-3 different answers. Which leads me to my blog post title: nobody really knows the truth. I’m not even sure that Matt Cutts knows himself, or if he is disclosing the entire truth. One of the people at the conference said that Mr. Cutts is the master of deception, since Google doesn’t want anybody to get too savvy about their bread-and-butter search engine.
In summary, the conference was a success and provided a good ROI for the time and money spent. Lots of valuable information was dispensed, and if nothing else allowed the delegates to hone their SEO skills and get some new ideas.
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